Best Books on Aesthetics and the Philosophy of Art

What makes something art? Can a urinal in a gallery be a masterpiece? Is beauty in the eye of the beholder, or are there objective standards? Why do some pieces of music make you cry, and what exactly is happening when they do? These are questions philosophers have argued about for centuries, and they are no closer to consensus now than Plato was when he tried to ban poets from his ideal republic. The books below are the ones worth reading if you want to think seriously about aesthetics and the philosophy of art. Some are accessible to complete beginners; others require patience. All of them are worth the effort. ## The Starting Point: Kant and Beauty You cannot get far in aesthetics without confronting Immanuel Kant's "Critique of Judgment," published in 1790. Kant argued that aesthetic judgments occupy a strange middle ground: they feel objective (when you say a painting is beautiful, you seem to be making a claim about the painting, not just about your feelings), but they cannot be proved the way empirical claims can be. He called this "subjective universality," and the tension he identified between the personal experience of beauty and the claim that beauty is real is still the central problem in aesthetics. The "Critique of Judgment" is not easy reading. Start with a good secondary source: **Ted Cohen and Paul Guyer's edited volume "Essays in Kant's Aesthetics"** is helpful for academics, but for general readers, Roger Scruton's "Kant: A Very Short Introduction" (the aesthetics chapters) is a better entry point. ## The Best General Introduction **"Art" by Clive Bell** is old (published in 1914) and has problems, but it remains one of the most readable and provocative introductions to the philosophy of art. Bell's central claim is that art has a quality he calls "significant form," a formal arrangement that produces a specific kind of aesthetic emotion. He is notoriously vague about what significant form actually is, and his particular aesthetic judgments are often embarrassing by modern standards. But his core question, what do all works of art have in common that makes them art, is still the right question, and his way of posing it is unusually clear. For something more recent and more rigorous, **"The Aesthetic Animal" by Henrik Skov Nielsen** is worth tracking down, though for most readers the best single-volume contemporary introduction is **Arthur Danto's "The Transfiguration of the Commonplace."** Danto, writing in 1981, takes Andy Warhol's Brillo boxes as his central puzzle: they look exactly like the cardboard boxes stacked in supermarket storerooms. What makes one a work of art and the other not? His answer, that art requires an "artworld," a context of theory and practice that constitutes something as art, is the most influential idea in late-twentieth-century aesthetics. ## Art and Meaning One of the most contested questions in aesthetics is whether art means anything, and if so, how. Does a poem mean what the poet intended? Or does meaning emerge from the encounter between the work and the reader, independent of whatever the author had in mind? W.K. Wimsatt and Monroe Beardsley's 1946 essay "The Intentional Fallacy" argued that authorial intention is irrelevant to interpretation. Roland Barthes pushed this further in "The Death of the Author" (1967). Both pieces are short and can be found in standard anthologies. They are worth reading alongside E.D. Hirsch's "Validity in Interpretation," which defends the relevance of authorial intention. The debate has not been settled, and that is part of what makes it interesting. ## Music and Emotion Music raises special problems for the philosophy of art. Unlike a painting of a sad face, music has no obvious referent. Yet some music makes listeners feel sad, or anxious, or exhilarated. What is the relationship between the formal properties of a piece of music and the emotional responses it produces? Peter Kivy's "Music Alone" is the best contemporary treatment of these questions. Kivy argues that music can be expressive of emotions, in the sense that a Saint Bernard's face is expressive of sadness, without anyone actually feeling those emotions. His position is controversial but carefully argued and very readable. ## The Political Philosophy of Art Art is not produced in a vacuum. Who funds it, who displays it, who has access to it, what subjects it is permitted to address: these are political questions as much as aesthetic ones. John Berger's "Ways of Seeing" (1972) is still the best popular account of how social power shapes what we see and how we see it. Its analysis of the Western tradition of the nude, and of advertising as a kind of degraded art, has aged remarkably well. ## Where to Go Next The philosophy of art is vast. Once you have read Danto and Kivy, you will have a sense of which questions interest you most. If you are drawn to questions about representation and meaning, look at Nelson Goodman's "Languages of Art." If questions about the ontology of artworks, what kind of thing is a symphony, exactly, grab you, look at Gregory Currie's "An Ontology of Art." The field rewards patient reading. Very few of these questions have clean answers, and the ones that seem to do not stay clean under examination. --- **Further reading:** [Browse all philosophy books on Skriuwer](/category/philosophy)